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The Luxury Fragrances of Oman

In addition to turbans of paisley-printed wool, Omani men layer on fragrances the way painters build up colors in a painting, and even dip the silk tassel of their dishdasha (the traditional male garment) into a favored scent. Per capita, men and women in the Persian Gulf are the biggest spenders on luxury perfume in the world.

Few things over the ages have signified luxury as powerfully as perfume. Susan Hack follows her nose to where it all began—the still-fragrance-obsessed sultanate of Oman.

In the Cradle of Scent

Few things over the ages have signified luxury as powerfully as perfume. Susan Hack follows her nose to where it all began—the still-fragrance-obsessed sultanate of Oman

In addition to turbans of paisley-printed wool, Omani men layer on fragrances the way painters build up colors in a painting, and even dip the silk tassel of their dishdasha (the traditional male garment) into a favored scent. Per capita, men and women in the Persian Gulf are the biggest spenders on luxury perfume in the world.

I’m on a scent-smelling trip to Salalah, an Arabian Sea port in Oman’s southwest governorate of Dhofar—the region that is the humid heart of the six-thousand-year-old frankincense trade. Friends in the capital, Muscat, swear Dhofar is the source not only of the world’s best frankincense but also of the Arab world’s finest bakhoor, incense hand-blended from resins, powdered flowers, perfumed oils, ground seashells, and other aromatics. Sold by female artisans from their homes, through women’s associations, in souks, and at weekly markets, bakhoor is burned daily in Oman to welcome guests, ward off bad luck, and cover cooking smells. Most important, bakhoors are part of the way men and women express themselves through fragrance, mixing and matching multiple scents according to season, whim, or social occasion. “From childhood Omanis learn to layer fragrance like artists building up colors in a painting,” Marcia Dorr, a Muscat-based author of several books on Omani heritage, had explained to me. “Women line clothes drawers with fresh jasmine and myrtle, apply scented oils and pastes to their hair and body, and add more layers by spraying perfumes onto incense-infused head scarves and abayas.”

My scent drawer at home in Cairo is no palette; it’s a dusty, overstuffed shrine to faded adventures. Among the mementos: a bottle of Jean Patou’s Joy from a high school Romeo (suggested by his mother); travel souvenirs such as clove bud oil from Zanzibar and a vial labeled Elephant Sweat, which the dealer claimed contained secretions from rutting elephants in Nigeria. There’s the mysterious, unlabeled crystal flask from my Filipina grandmother; decades of birthday and anniversary gifts; and a few touchstones of lost romances, stoppers shut from disuse, fragrances too agonizing either to toss or reopen.

At 9 p.m. on a May full-moon evening, I set off from my Salalah beach hotel seeking an Omani fragrance makeover. Though I might not be up for censing clothes stretched over a palm wood frame (which sounds like a fire hazard), I would like to better use my collection by learning how to wear several fragrances simultaneously.

The heat, which shuts down business midday, has barely dissipated, so I pause for a drink of fresh coconut at one of the gas-lit street stalls selling mangoes, papayas, and bananas fresh from spring-fed coastal plantations. Visited by Marco Polo and the Ming Dynasty admiral Zheng He, Salalah (once known as Zafar) is re-emerging as an exotic tourism destination, colored by current geopolitical intrigues. The government is restoring forts and millennia-old frankincense depots to attract cultural travelers, while tagging Salalah’s harbor for the development of a $260-million cruise ship port and an expanded container ship terminal that could enable vessels to bypass a potentially fractious Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. The hope is that the new luxury villas and beach resorts sprouting along Dhofar’s dramatic mountain-backed coast will fill with vacationers from the Persian Gulf states. Meanwhile, on weekends hotel bars buzz with foreign contractors and staff stationed at Thumrait Air Base, which Oman has allowed the U.S. military to use for operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Arabian Peninsula.

In Salalah’s central district of low cream-colored modern buildings (the tradition-minded ruler of this oil-rich nation has banned skyscrapers), I ask directions to the Haffah Souk and its row of female bakhoor merchants. I am on a pilgrimage to meet Laila Al Baraka, a local scent guru whose Arabic moniker means “The Blessed.”

Three men wearing embroidered kumma hats and white dishdashas with the traditional tassel at the collar stand at her glass counter, selecting gifts for their families. Clad in a black abaya, head scarf, and face veil, Al Baraka sprinkles pinches of different bakhoors onto a hot disk of charcoal in a red-and-green-painted clay incense burner. Between samples, the men sniff an open tin of ground coffee to clear their olfactory receptors (I’m immediately reminded of a wine-tasting session), then use their right hands to scoop smoke tendrils up to their nostrils. Al Baraka indicates with her kohl-rimmed, smoke-shot eyes that I should take a seat. Awaiting my consultation amid mysterious aromas (animal, vegetable, mineral?), I detect a few familiar notes: rose, jasmine, and sandalwood.

Gold, the first fragrance of the Omani perfume house Amouage—founded by decree of the sultan—was designed by the great perfumer Guy Robert, who created Madame Rochas and Calèche, among others. It is said that he considered Gold the finest achievment of his career.

Al Baraka makes bakhoors along with perfumed hair oils and skin unguents. Ten years in a business she learned from her mother have enabled the single thirty-year-old to buy a house for her extended family. I ask if, like some Western perfume creators, she has a story or a person in mind when designing a scent. She replies that Omanis already know what they are after, what they like and don’t like; many buy pure ingredients and make their own bakhoor at home. Her advice is practical, almost pharmaceutical. Musk binds perfumed oils to fragrant wood. Sandalwood powder helps smoke cling to your clothes. Ground cardamom pods serve as the burning agent for clients who can’t afford expensive ingredients.

I tell Al Baraka I’d like to select a bakhoor to take back to my husband in Cairo, who, it must be said, has asthma; I want to sweeten our home and broaden our senses, not kill him. Hearing that we are both bakhoor virgins, Al Baraka reaches with henna-painted hands for one of her best sellers. Handwritten on masking tape, the Arabic label translates as “Wood Function.”

The name, it turns out, refers only to the product’s base: slow-burning pieces of high-quality oudh. Oudh is the Arabic term for the fragrant ebony-colored resin secreted in reaction to an invasive fungus by the heartwood of Aquilaria malaccensis, an Asian evergreen tree. In a process analogous to creating cultured pearls, Aquilaria trees on plantations from Thailand to Indonesia are artificially infected to produce the resin, also called aloeswood and agarwood. Wild oudh is now exceedingly rare and can cost tens of thousands of dollars per pound. A thumb-size fragment will burn for hours, releasing a sweet, earthy aroma that to a desert imagination evokes something sublime: the fertile, humid undergrowth of an eternally green forest.

Oudh has of late become a buzzword for luxury among perfume marketing consultants, for whom it evokes a deep-pocketed universe of prestige-conscious Arab sheiks, and a fragrance trend led by the likes of Kilian Hennessy, Christian Dior, and Tom Ford. In Dhofar, Al Baraka informs me, affluent honor-obsessed mothers order pungent oudh bakhoors for their daughters’ weddings. The bride’s skin will be polished with scented scrubs and massaged with perfumed oils and creams. Hands and feet will be hennaed, hair scented with pomade. The final touch is the bakhoor-censed Dhofari wedding garment, a tentlike dress of black velvet embroidered with crystals and sequins.

The scent of Wood Function in the jar is heavy, dense, and tinged with rose oil. For the full effect, Al Baraka advises, I should light it up precisely two hours before my beloved comes home from work. She turns to pluck a little something for me from a shelf of gold jars and glittery crystal bottles. Rubbed on the skin, she says, this solid perfume of white musk and powdered frankincense will soften my arms and help Wood Function seem more interesting, creating the fragrant equivalent of a conversation—and a lingerie ensemble.

Back at the hotel, the air in my room smells stuffy. How could I not have noticed this before? I try lighting some frankincense purchased in the souk. The crystallized sap of Boswelliasacra trees, frankincense was a gift of the Magi, once more valuable than gold. I take care to place the ashtray on the bathroom sink so I don’t inadvertently tip over the charcoal disk and set the whole establishment ablaze. Pearl-size globs shine and dissolve in the heat, releasing a fragrance of citrus, mint, black pepper, and camphor that transports me from the shore of Arabia to a childhood church Christmas pageant. The Omani practice of burning incense for pleasure as well as hygiene is a remnant of a time when frankincense, a multi-purpose aromatic with antiseptic qualities, repelled bugs and appeased deities in the temples of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and Byzantium. Today in mosques, shopping malls, offices, and hotel lobbies across the country, translucent nuggets sizzle and sputter on charcoal braziers or electric incense burners, the practice so prevalent that travelers immediately register the national signature scent, as much a leitmotif as dried lavender is to the south of France.

At the Museum of Frankincense in Salalah, there is a small ornamental orchard of Boswellia sacra, squat, short-trunked trees with curly green leaves and a liver-red wood beneath paper-thin silver bark. But to visit the wild groves where the resin is actually harvested requires a guide and a four-by-four. Mussallem Hassan Al Mahri, a fifty-one-year-old former Omani Army officer, picks me up at my beach hotel the morning after my shopping sortie; we are headed to the Wadi Dawkah Frankincense Reserve, a forest of five thousand trees that’s twenty-five miles north of Salalah and a UNESCO World Heritage Site near the ruins of a five-millennia- old caravan depot.

These Near Eastern aromatics were the earliest embodiments of luxury, and they are still the very roots of our romance with fragrance. read more

My guide’s mother tongue is Mahari, the name of his tribe and a remnant of Himyar, an ancient click-filled Semitic language spoken until the advent of Islam, in the seventh century. He was born in a cave to a family of camel and goat herders, and his sense of smell is alarmingly acute. “Later I will smell camel on your sweat,” Al Mahri predicts confidently over a lunch of boiled leg of camel, young camel stewed with onion, garlic, and tomato, and camel preserved in its own fat, served with a side of rice scented with cardamom, cinnamon, black pepper, coriander, and cumin. Back on the road, wondering if the sharp-nosed locals find camel-tinged sweat appealing or repulsive, I tell Al Mahri that he and his four-wheel drive smell nice. “Frankincense,” he says with a grin, pointing to his mouth and a stash stored in the glove compartment. “It’s better than any chewing gum. The flavor lasts all day, it kills bacteria and helps your teeth, and it gets rid of gas and keeps your belly light.”

In antiquity, Dhofar appeared on maps as Arabia Felix, Latin for “Happy Arabia,” a reference to both the wealth of frankincense traders and a microclimate that bore witness to a miracle of regeneration. The 5,900-foot-high Dhofar Escarpment that looms above Salalah acts like a sail to catch moisture-laden clouds from the annual southwest monsoon, whose winds still blow lateen-sailed dhows from East Africa through the Arabian Sea to India. During the season known as the khareef, from June through September, rain turns Dhofar’s dun-colored coastal plains and sea-facing crags as emerald as Ireland. Camels come down from the hills to find firm footing, and visitors from across the brutally hot Arabian Peninsula arrive to wear sweaters and fog-bathe on beaches, to savor what is for them a paradisiacal phenomenon: greenery, waterfalls, and drizzle.

Some twenty-five species of Boswellia grow from Somalia to Rajasthan. But the finest, Boswellia sacra, thrives only in a fifty-mile-wide belt between the ocean and the Empty Quarter (the vast and waterless dune field in the middle of the Arabian Peninsula); the trees prefer arid wadis barely licked by mist and the back slopes of ridges in the humid shadow of the monsoon. In the past, to keep the limited habitat secret, middlemen—as well as the fifth-century b.c. Greek traveler Herodotus—were given to believe that Dhofar’s mists were toxic and that fire-breathing flying serpents guarded the groves. The female pharaoh Hatshepsut managed to acquire some trees for transplant in Egypt, but her monopoly-busting experiment failed to take root.

In Cairo, I once came across an old perfumer’s ledger containing a commission for a formula described as “the smell of sand.” I have always assumed that the client was a desert-loving ascetic, until the moment I get out of the car, two hours after lunch, and smell the fat tears of resin weeping from shallow cuts in a Boswellia sacra’s scaly bark. As bees sip nectar from the trees’ white and yellow flowers, I close my eyes and imagine the old caravans, hundreds of mules and camels long. As Omanis still do today, the merchants might have used a few precious frankincense lumps to purify brackish oasis water while their cargo emitted an aromatic beacon filling the vacuum between sand and stars.

Al Mahri explains that harvesters tap the trees three times between March and August, recutting in the same spot to get a progressively stronger-smelling sap, which is left to harden for two weeks before being collected and sorted according to shape, purity, origin, and color. He insists that the frankincense which grows farther east, in the crannies of the Jebel Samham, Dhofar’s highest mountain, is even better. There, Al Mahri buys his personal supply from an elderly Omani grove owner, perhaps the last of his line to work in the field.

The industry was at its peak just before World War II, when some three thousand families harvested six thousand tons of frankincense annually. The trade declined after India imposed a tax on frankincense in 1947 and after the development of the oil fields of Arabia in the 1950s lured away Dhofari laborers in search of their fortune.

Realizing that black gold won’t last forever, His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said al Said has spent the last four decades building roads, universities, and other modern infrastructure. Young people, Al Mahri says, are leaving Dhofar’s hinterlands for jobs in cities. “Why spend time going back to the Middle Ages?” Al Mahri asks. “You have to guard the trees, sleep in the rocks with spiders and snakes, and collect the frankincense over time by the handful until you have a ninety-pound bag that might sell for only $350—and which you have to transport back to town by foot or camel.” Omani families with hereditary rights to wild Boswellia trees increasingly leave them untended or lease them to managers and seasonal laborers from Somalia. Some say the migrants are less attentive to age-old cycles of rest and rotation, and that Oman’s crop is becoming smaller and less fragrant.

Petals of roses from the Jebel Akhdar region are collected over a few weeks every spring…and are made into Oman's famous rose water, used for perfumes, cooking sweets, and welcoming guests.

To get a better fix on the different grades of frankincense, I arrange to meet Trygve Harris, a forty-eight-year-old American from Santa Barbara who moved to Salalah four years ago to source aromatics for Enfleurage, her essential oils company in Manhattan. The outgoing strawberry blond is a world traveler and professional scent-hunter who has attended secretive oudh auctions in India and the flower harvests of Egypt’s Nile Delta.

From her purse she plucks scent vials to share: Indian jasmine (“to feel fresh and lovely”), Italian bergamot (“I rub it with the jasmine if I feel tired”), the oil of baby eucalyptus leaves from Corsica (“divine”), and a treasure, pure oil from a wild oudh she discovered in Laos, which she dabs on as a kind of business suit “if I’m with Omanis and want to be taken seriously.” In the souk alleys, she identifies locally harvested myrrh (a brown, crumbly resin with a cinnamon-like kick), ambergris (lumps of partly digested giant squid beaks, excreted by sperm whales, that wash up on Oman’s coastline), and dhufr (fishy-smelling sea snail shell flaps, which look like blackened toenails and are powdered for use as a perfume fixative).

Harris earned the entrepreneurial respect of locals by inventing Oman’s first frankincense ice cream, which she cranks out in artisanal batches using frankincense oil from her small distillery and full-cream cow’s milk purchased from the sultan’s personal Dhofar dairy. It sounds like one of those weird trophy foods that travelers try for boasting rights. But when she scoops some out of the cooler brought to my hotel, I am immediately addicted to the most amazingly delicious ice cream of my life—not too sweet, camphor cool without being medicinal, and with that same lovely confusion of taste and smell you get when eating a rose water–infused loukoum, or Turkish delight. “I make it using black frankincense that grows near the sea,” Harris says cheerfully, offering me a second bowl. “Those trees on the cliffs above Mugsayl Beach are like stout, strong, confident old ladies, and they produce resin with a spicy, orange note.”

On the Gulf of Oman, 625 miles north of Salalah, Muscat was once the base of a maritime empire that stretched from Mozambique to Baluchistan. The end of African slavery and the rise of modern European shipping in the nineteenth century led to the decline and obsolescence of Oman’s warships and wooden trading dhows, some of which were larger than Portuguese galleons.

In 1970, when Sultan Qaboos took power from his father in a British-backed coup, Muscat was a backwater with only nine miles of paved roads, including the driveway from the Muttrah souk to the royal palace. Oil wealth sped the city’s transformation into a modern capital, guided by the vision of the scent-loving ruler, who built a mountaintop lookout in the shape of a giant incense burner.

Amid the distractions of twenty-first-century life (including the new Royal Opera House Muscat where Plácido Domingo and Yo-Yo Ma filled out the inaugural season), frankincense connects Omani urban sophisticates to their heritage, to nature, and to spiritual life. At the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque, high-quality frankincense burns in the underground air-conditioning plant, and I detect its scent wafting over shelves holding Korans and into the men’s hall that has space for six thousand worshippers. “To smell good in the mosque is a sign of respect for your religion and fellow man,” observes Murtadha Al Lawati, one of the faithful. “It prepares your little soul to meet the big soul.” The Prophet Muhammad, who advised followers to wear perfume for Friday noon prayers, smelled “heavenly,” his companions reported. Even the beads of sweat on his forehead smelled wondrous.

Oman's rose water is ued to imbue clothing, furnishings, and even cars, with lingering fragrance.

The House of Amouage, Oman’s prestigious (and only) international fragrance line, was founded in 1983 at the behest of the ruler, who hoped to sustain the frankincense industry through modern perfumery. Famous for its presentation bottles with caps shaped like the handle of a dagger, as well as for combinations of as many as 120 ingredients, Amouage is among the world’s most expensive brands, and Queen Elizabeth and Vladimir Putin are rumored to be two lucky recipients of fragrant royal largesse.

Although frankincense was the inspiration and reference point, Amouage cannot use the genuine ingredient these days, ironically relying, like many manufacturers, on bespoke synthetic molecules. “To be in the perfume industry you have to be a chemist,” says David Crickmore, the company’s British CEO, with a sigh. “We can’t use natural frankincense because the International Fragrance Association has decided that it can be allergenic.”

While sipping cappuccinos in the private consultation room of Amouage’s flagship boutique, I meet Hassan Al-Saleh, a thirtysomething Georgetown University graduate and the managing partner of a Muscat PR company. “I love putting fragrance on my tassel,” he confides. And he is particularly fond of Amouage’s Tribute Attar, an oil-based fragrance redolent of frankincense, saffron, rose, and tobacco. Fingering the six-inch-long tuft of white silk dangling from the neckline of his dishdasha, he says dreamily, “When the tassel moves, you might catch a whiff of something completely surprising and unexpected.”

To give me an idea of how an Omani might combine the scents he likes, Al-Saleh shares an account of his routine prior to heading out to a formal event. Just after showering, he spritzes perfume on damp skin. Then he selects a bespoke dishdasha infused with incense, whose sleeve trim matches a length of paisley-printed wool that he wraps into a turban. “If I wake up feeling incredibly confident,” Al-Saleh says, “I might slap pure oudh oil on my temples, although oudh is really for evening or special occasions.”

I ask a salesman if I can try Attar Oudh Al Khaloud, or Oudh of Eternity. This molasses-thick essential oil is distilled from authentic Indian resins, some more than thirty years old; a teaspoon retails for a breathtaking $364.

Sniffing the drop on the back of my hand, I’m shocked by its almost unwearable concentration. This is surely the perfume world’s equivalent of durian, the delicious Asian fruit whose paradoxical fecal stink gets you kicked off an airplane if you try to smuggle one on board. Peaty, fungal, and overwhelmingly raunchy, the attar conjures a sweaty stallion whizzing on a decaying pile of clover. Yet hours later, the fragrance has nearly seduced me, evolving on my skin into something pleasantly full and woody.

Back in Cairo, I unpack boxes of frankincense and myrrh, the glass jar of Wood Function, a can of Oudh Aerosol Car Freshener, rose oil from the slopes of Jebel Akhdar in the Hajar Mountains, an oudh travel candle from Amouage, an oudh oil blended with saffron and amber, and, because it seemed to my newly trained nose to go nicely with all of the above, an airport duty-free bottle of the eponymous perfume by Lebanese designer Elie Saab.

Precious botanicals are also mixed into bakhoors, custom blends of incense burned daily to perfume the air.

“You don’t want to be too strong with men or when entering a house with its own scent and children,” Maryam Al Zadjali, the head of the Omani Society for Fine Arts, had advised me, adding that she likes to burn frankincense in her home and to mix Miss Dior with a bit of oudh oil and jasmine. “But with your husband or at gatherings with other ladies, you want to stand out, show that you have a bit of luxury, that you are creative and know how to take care of yourself.”

My spouse comes home from work. A taste bud–challenged diner who once reported after a meal at a three-Michelin-star restaurant, “I liked that fish with the sauce,” he is appreciative but a bit overwhelmed by the unfamiliar bouquets. I ask him to close his eyes as I build up the layers and talk of souks, old palaces, women trailing scent to a desert well, perfume tassels, and electric frankincense burners.

“Oudh and frankincense are ingrained in Omani DNA,” Hassan Al-Saleh had told me. “When a baby is born, relatives will rub oudh oil between their hands and massage it into the baby’s blanket as a gesture of purity, and to me the scent still feels comforting. When I was studying abroad, I would put on oudh and burn a little bakhoor if I felt homesick. The combination of oudh and bakhoor is something we Omanis will always carry with us.”

My husband and I inhale, and suddenly we are there too, in an antique land traveling on waves of scent into the future.